Most collaboration tools support access to documents, but almost always, end users are forced to “upload” or “attach” documents into the data storage area of the collaboration service. There are several disadvantages to this situation as it exists in the industry.
Firstly, uploading a document creates a copy of the document: one copy (referred to as “A”) is on the original storage medium, and the other copy (referred to as “B”) is located in the collaboration service being used. For example, if a first user (referred to as “X”) has a document (A) on the local hard drive of X's laptop and X logs into a collaboration service to share A, then X must also upload A from X's hard drive into the collaboration service's document storage area (or workspace) as copy B, thereby leaving a copy (A) on X's hard drive and a second copy (B) in the collaboration service's workspace area.
Secondly, collaboration documents leave the Governance Risk Management and Compliance (referred to as “GRC”) environment of the end-user's source area, which can be problematic from a legal standpoint for an enterprise. For example, suppose a document (A) is on a file server and then an end user uploads a copy (B) into a collaboration service, such as Google Wave®. Once that file (A) leaves the file server, it leaves the context of audit, policy, control, accounting, and enterprise storage reporting. Moreover, if A gets deleted off of the file server, the corporate tools that monitor and maintain corporate data, often can no longer find or report on the file. Further, if A is or has content that is out-of-policy, A is often now outside the control of enterprise storage management tools once A enters the collaboration service's storage area as a copy B.
Thirdly, when documents leave their native environments the back up and virus protection services offered by their native source storage services are lost. So, if a document leaves a mapped drive server, it is no longer backed up or checked for anti-viruses as it once was once that document is located in the collaboration environment.
Thus, once documents leave the original source environment, they can be copied, and forwarded, which essentially creates multiple versions of the document and it is not easy to discover which one of the copied documents is the most recent version of the document. Accordingly, versioning is compromised. Also, all access control methodologies used on the document are made void, since a received copy of the document can freely forwarded to others around the Internet.